Veritas Ports Foundation Suite to Linux

Veritas Software Corp., like many of its enterprise IT software rivals, is increasing its product catalog for Linux users.

The Mountain View, Calif., company on Wednesday announced Foundation Suite 1.1 for Linux. Available now, Foundation Suite is Veritas primary storage virtualization software, previously available for Microsoft Corp.s Windows, Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris and various other Unix platforms.

"We look at it from the aspect that it should be architecture-independent," said Marty Ward, director of high-availability and storage virtualization products. Though porting the software to Linux didnt present any special programming challenges, Veritas waited until there was sufficient customer demand, he said.

A side effect of the move was Veritas getting closer to the open-source community.

"Weve made several enhancements that weve opened up and sent back into the Linux kernel development," like page caching and memory management technology, Ward said.

The products been in beta for three months, he said.

Veritas will also add Linux support to its clustering and high-availability software later this year or early next year, Ward said. Linux is also on the docket for a new version of Veritas storage-area networking management software, he said.